The fact that your refrigerator (depending on the model) can tell you that you need to stop off at the store to buy milk is nothing new. The Internet of Things, or IoT, has been around for a while, but saving you a trip to the shops once home is one thing. Saving you a trip to the seabed or the middle of a desert is quite another. Welcome to Shepherd’s direct line from equipment to ERP.
From the Field to the ERP: Real-Time Insights
The thing with heavy equipment is exactly that: it’s heavy. It’s heavy because it has a tough job to do, typically because it is in a tough environment. And because it is built heavy and capable of such challenges in demanding surroundings, it’s expensive. In other words, a costly investment for the company that owns it, and one that deserves to be well-maintained if it’s to continue turning that investment into a return.
If such equipment suffers a failure, the downtime is costly, the lead-time for parts can be lengthy, compounding downtime further, and getting the staff and equipment to where the machine is may also be a challenge in itself. This is about as strong a business case for preventative maintenance as you can ask for.
Proactive Planning with Performance Data
For that maintenance to be worthwhile and effective, you need to know what is going on with the machine—what conditions it has had to work under and for how long. If it has a sensor, it can take a reading. If it can take a reading, it can transmit one. And that is where Shepherd comes in: capturing that information and transmogrifying it into something that allows the service manager to plan ahead and order ahead, depending on the need.
Despite heavy machinery being the opening example, what follows could be applied to any asset that requires monitoring in the field. It might be catering equipment for events, coffee machines in airports across a hemisphere. It could be medical devices in hospitals or air ambulances. Anything where monitoring day-to-day condition and performance parameters in the field is needed. The point is that information can now be accessed in an instant, whether the equipment is an hour’s drive away, on another continent, in a mine shaft, or at the bottom of the ocean. If there’s a signal, it’s accessible.
All this can ensure that, if a machine needs a service or parts, the responsible party can organise and schedule either before that machine runs out of its service interval allowance. At this point, it is worth making a distinction between the ability of these machines to liaise with the internet or telecoms networks. The fact that these machines offer a remote breakdown of their performance stats and related error codes is not Shepherd’s doing.
Automated ERP Integration for Smarter Service
Where Shepherd has applied its know-how is in allowing this information source to feed into the ERP, NetSuite. In doing so, it means that this information can go toward Shepherd’s EAM capabilities for service scheduling and parts ordering according to service manuals and service contracts already fed into its databases. If you are a service manager with dozens of machines in numerous locations and timezones, that is an undeniable help and a safety-net against the costly delays described a little earlier.
Such a team member would have to collate the information individually and feed it into whichever tracking system has been devised. The Shepherd involvement ensures that this still happens only with more automation, meaning that team members can still keep an eye on things but don’t need to worry about inputting, manipulating, or transferring the data. Instead, they can focus on the unforeseen issues that all too often arise.
Freeing up human initiative for where it’s needed
In the past, those would have been the blindsides that would threaten a day’s work. Now, those events are just Murphy’s Law manifesting as it does, but that team member has the time and headspace to tackle them with all their resources, the rest being handled automatically through Shepherd and NetSuite.
It is not only the life of workers in the service department that is simplified. It could also give the service department a good overview of whether field-based staff are doing what’s needed, regardless of what they might claim.
Without the insights available, the preceding approach had to be a combination of hoping for the best but planning for the worst. In other words, a costly up front investment in a stock of spares that may not see use for months, just in case the need arises. Or pricing services in such a way that the inevitable downtime for servicing in the field, when it came, could be covered financially. Instead, they can now order with intent and then price accordingly.
If not outright eliminated, these are now greatly reduced risk factors, given the foresight and planning made possible by the direct transfer of performance data to the ERP and its manipulation into service orders by Shepherd’s EAM suite of solutions. If this sounds like a benefit your company could benefit from, perhaps it’s time to embrace the potential of the IoT and book a demo with Shepherd today.
